This is the age of fast-paced technological advancements, almost all industries are relying on digital technologies to improve productivity, and boost growth. From agriculture to manufacturing to the fashion industry, almost organizations are transforming digitally and the banking industry is no different. Banks, credit unions, lenders and other financial institutions are making genuine efforts to adopt a fully digital and automated system to grow their business and enhance their services. The first step towards digital transformation is conversion of all vital data into digital format. Document conversion services and smart scanning solutions are available to convert data into digital format, making it easier to extract valuable insights to make informed decisions.
Banks are investing hugely to build their digital capabilities, provide excellent customer service, and stay competitive, especially after the outbreak of the pandemic. When the rush of loan applications for the Paycheck Protection Program threatened to swamp lenders, some banks hired more staff to manage the rise in applications, incurring greater costs to capture the opportunity. Other banks invested in automation technology to improve efficiency, increase productivity, enhance the efficiency of banking operations, process loans quickly and boost customer satisfaction.
Why Banks need Automation
Transformation of bank data into digital format helps process, monitor and evaluate data, including vast amounts of client data such as personal and security information. This helps to improve overall performance and profitability. It also helps to resolve inefficiencies in the banking system. But understanding which problem to resolve first is important.
Though banks have adopted advanced technology and use customer resource management software for managing customer accounts, they still rely on emails to for requesting and collecting documents from customers to complete the loan application process. This was a common practice especially when the banks were closed and transactions were managed remotely.
When emails are used for customer data collection, customers often struggle with printing, scanning, file-size limits, bounced emails, tracking documents, etc. This can lead to less satisfied customers and can even lead to abandoning of the loan process before it is completed.
On the administration side, email loan officers and administrators are forced to manually pull the documents and information from email to enter them into spread sheets that track loan status, following up with customers to ask for missing documents and so on. All of these activities are tedious and chaotic and lead to confusion. Manually entering data when handling these records can cause errors and privacy breach as sensitive documents languish in email inboxes. But all these issues can be resolved with automation.
Benefits of Automating Banking Operations
Workflow and content automation help improve and accelerate banks’ loan processing capacity and improve the customer experience. All documents can be shared, processed, tracked, and collected by creating an intuitive customer portal, allowing customers and loan officers check the status of the loan, revise document requests, etc. Automation of workflow also helps to loan officers to easily manage documents with features designed to eliminate friction in the process, digitally complete online forms, and upload original documents using their smartphone etc.
Automation and digitization in banks also improves regulatory compliance through standardized communication templates, automated file management, and removing the need for sensitive customer files to pass through staff email inboxes. It also helps eliminate time consuming manual process of managing the document collection process. It enables banks to improve their capacity to process loans quickly and efficiently, and faster funding of customer loans with greater ease. It also helps the banking officials to work smarter than harder.
According to Deloitte’s Banking and Capital Markets Outlook, the main element that propelled the need for digital transformation was the outbreak of the pandemic.
Bank and other financial institutions are struggling to adapt to the fast changing technology. The right technology team and partnership can provide executives with the strategy and road map to realize measured, ongoing success and create innovation. Conversion of data into digital format is the first step towards digital transformation. So reach out to a reliable data conversion service to convert all data into digital form and replace all paper based documents. An experienced document scanning company can handle large volumes of files and convert them into a single file which can be stored digitally. Working with the right outsourcing partner can help financial institutions improve workflow and efficiency, minimize the time taken to process payments and ensure a better customer experience.
